Candidates have limited control in an interview. They cannot control the questions they will be asked nor can they control the manner by which employers will rank and weigh their responses. They cannot control interviewer bias.

Despite such noble intentions, candidates are frequently rejected or hired for other criteria. Over the past several months, we have had candidates eliminated by clients not for failing to check off the exhaustive list of requisite experience, skills or competencies but rather...

Many hiring managers read resumes in a cursory manner. They review the companies and roles that candidates have filled over their careers while making note of education levels, stability, the quality/consistency of overall career trajectory, and purported skills, knowledge and competencies.

Executive search processes and their outcomes fascinate me to no end. I enjoy trying to figure out how organizations determine their requirements and how well the outcomes line up to them. The recent decision to hire Ron Tavener as OPP Commissioner is a case in point.

In our last post we discussed the temptations facing unemployed executives to move with extreme haste in finding a new role. Conceptualizing job loss as akin to falling off a horse they associate ‘down time' with unproductive, time-consuming activity.

Every week, without exception, we meet executives who have jumped back on their horses in this very manner and embraced a ‘spray and pray' job search strategy. For some it may work like a charm but for the majority, dare I say the vast majority, it is the wrong approach.

The message for companies is pay attention, respect personal dignity, gives candidates a voice and some control over the process, and treat them as partners in an important relationship. Not only will companies have a higher chance of hiring them, on terms possibly more favorable, but as it turns out, keeping them.

I had the occasion this week to chat with an entrepreneur still licking his wounds from a stalled startup venture. His tale is a reminder of how easily companies misunderstand organizational context when hiring. For startups, such a misunderstanding can be fatal.

The startup in question was incubated within a large corporation. When its technology began to show commercial promise the parent company decided to spin it out and replace the young techie-founder with a more experienced CEO. As the founder adjusted to being relegated to CTO, the parent firm retained a big international headhunter to conduct a global search for a CEO who would launch the company’s technologies into the marketplace.

After several months, the new CEO was introduced, an individual who had been the European head of a major player in their sector. The executive boasted ‘global perspective’, intimacy with the startup’s target markets, strong relationships within his employer of the past five years (an important potential partner for the startup), an excellent track record in driving revenue growth and……. startup experience. Specifically, the individual had successfully established and scaled his firm’s subsidiary operations across all of Europe.

With the primary objective of growing revenues, the new CEO put his team together and took the very young company aggressively into the marketplace. Unfortunately, the market did not respond as expected. Undeterred, the sales-pedigreed CEO persevered, pounding away, month after month selling harder to more and more companies. But when the stench of the dead horse in his briefcase finally overwhelmed him he retreated and recommended to his board that they take the technology business in another direction. By this time however, both the company funds and optimism were depleted and the parent company pulled the plug on the startup.

Despite what the organization trumpeted when they hired him, the ‘experienced’ CEO was not the startup savvy operator they expected or needed. Instead he was a subsidiary savvy professional manager. He was experienced at taking a proven business model, tweaking it for the local market and then implementing it. Success came from localization of a playbook. The early-stage startup on the other hand is trial and error experimentation. It is improvisational, bobbing and weaving, shape-shifting adaptation in response to market feedback. Growing revenues is not ‘sales’ as understood by someone working for Oracle or IBM but rather early stage business development, missionary stuff made of proselytizing, and evangelizing. It is creative work that requires an entrepreneur’s ear for meaningful feedback and nose for course adjustment. And while these early stage attributes often do not scale as the business starts to grow, an overly optimistic company that hires directly for the scaling stage may find it has no company to scale.

Context is the set of conditions that defines a particular organization. It includes variables such as location, structure, culture, political environment, competition, employee demographics, ownership, financial resources, markets and strategy. Context affects the characteristics of a business, its prevailing attitudes and behaviors. Early stage companies differ from mature companies; cash-starved companies differ from those rich in resources; Israeli companies differ from Korean companies; a branch office differs from a head office environment; and a family business differs from a professionally managed enterprise. Most importantly perhaps, the people who thrive in one context cannot be assumed to thrive in another and thus extreme care must be exercised when hiring someone for a given company and situation.

The company in question knew it needed a ‘fighter’ and paid a fortune to hire a professional boxer from half way around the world. It then threw this individual into an ‘anything goes’ local street fight. The ensuing pain was a direct result of misunderstanding differences between the two contexts and type of fighters who thrive in each.

About the Author

Robert Hebert is the founder and Managing Partner of StoneWood Group Inc., a leading executive search firm in Canada. Since 1981, he has helped firms across a wide range of sectors address their senior recruiting, assessment and leadership development requirements.

Contact Robert by email at rhebert@stonewoodgroup.com or call (1) 416-365-9494 EXT 777